The Commander in Chief of MSNBC

Which American groups hasn't Obama demonstrated palpable disdain for, either before or after becoming president? Basically MSNBC, Media Matters, Comedy Central, the builders of the Ground Zero mosque, and academia, it seems.

“I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me,” Barack Obama told the AP in the early 1990s, as Joel Kotkin reminds us, in this passage highlighted by Instapundit:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

Add that to Obama’s previous utterances regarding other aspects of America that induced in him a sense of ennui as a young man. In 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted this telling passage in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama on the campaign trail:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Flash-forward two years, as Doug Powers runs down what is likely an incomplete list of the numerous industries that Obama, once in power, punitively demonized with either harsh rhetoric, harsh legislation, or both, and then asks:

And of course, Obama has thoroughly demonized Republicans, both as a group and individually by name before and after taking office. And the Chamber of Commerce. And Fox News. And Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. And even “the Professional Left,” in a crude effort at triangulation. And many of America’s previously stalwart foreign allies have felt the cold shoulder as well, starting with England.

And note the 20 percent number that Kotkin quoted above. The president has rather consistently backed issues approved by 40 to 20 percent of the public, a trend that seemed to only increase this summer, perhaps explained by an attempt to rally his moribund base. But for the rest of us it’s an awfully perplexing strategy.

So who’s left? Basically Media Matters, MSNBC, Comedy Central, the builders of the Ground Zero mosque, and academia, it seems. While I can understand the president wanting to circle the wagons, it’s awfully difficult to rally the country from inside the studios of MSNBC, no matter how robust their switchboard system.

In her latest op-ed, Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post takes time in between gushing over the president to finally figure out another element of what ails him as a leader:

Stewart had just asked Obama how he could square his campaign mantra of “change” with hiring economic advisers such as Larry Summers, who looks the same as those who had served in previous administrations. In response, Obama said that Summers had done a “heck of a job.”

Whereupon, Stewart said, “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.”

Everyone got the joke. George W. Bush used the same words to commend Michael “Brownie” Brown after his disastrous performance as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency following Hurricane Katrina. Translation: You’re fired.

Everyone got the joke, that is, except for Obama. He got it eventually, after seeing the “oops” expression on Stewart’s face, but he couldn’t take the joke. There’s a world of difference.

Instead of laughing at himself, he turned to the audience – a beat too late – and said, “Pun intended.”

No, it wasn’t. Anyone watching could see that. He slipped. Obama is a nice guy; he was trying to say something nice about Summers, and “heck of a job” just tumbled out. No big deal. We get it. Stuff happens. But Obama couldn’t roll with the gut punch.

In that, among other moments, Obama revealed his fatal flaw. He has no sense of humor. He might be able to laugh at a joke. He can even tell one, as he demonstrated at the last White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Whoever wrote that script should send his resume to Comedy Central. Oh, wait, some of the writers do work at Comedy Central.

No, what Obama revealed was that he has no sense of humor about himself. This is utterly huge.

It is entirely appropriate that the president take his job seriously. And no one would urge Obama (or anyone else) to try to be funny with Jon Stewart. He’s the funny guy, and producers doubtless remind guests of that fact. A good guest on “The Daily Show” is expected to be the straight man so that the comedian has some place to go with the material. I’m sure there’s a Rolodex of “bad guests” who tried to out-funny the comedian.

But it is imperative that leaders not take themselves too seriously. What should Obama have done instead? How about saying: “I can’t believe I just said that”? Or, “Oy!”? Whatever. Anything to signal to the audience that, “Oh, well, I’m human.”

But it’s awfully hard to have a sense of humor when you’re so disdainful of a large swatch of the nation you govern. (How bad is it? This bad.) You risk appearing not as an elected official, but as a stiff clichéd parody university professor, all but looking down at the voters from the bridge of your pince-nez. Or as James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Barack Obama is a pragmatist, James Kloppenberg tells the New York Times. No, he doesn’t mean Obama is practical-minded; no one thinks that anymore. In fact, Kloppenberg, a Harvard historian, disparages the “vulgar pragmatism” of Bill Clinton while praising Obama’s “philosophical pragmatism”:

It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

Kloppenberg has a new book coming out, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes and the American Political Tradition.” According to the Times, Kloppenberg “sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president,” a “true intellectual.” Such philosophers are a “rare breed”: the Adamses, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson and now Obama.

“Imagine the Republicans driving the economy into a ditch,” the philosopher president said the other day. “And it’s a deep ditch. It’s a big ditch. And somehow they walked away from the accident, and we put on our boots and we rappelled down into the ditch–me and Jack and Sheldon and Jim and Patrick. We’ve been pushing, pushing, trying to get that car out of the ditch. And meanwhile, the Republicans are standing there, sipping on a Slurpee.” John Dewey had nothing on this guy!

If the president does not seem to be the intellectual heavyweight Kloppenberg makes him out to be, the Harvard historian has an explanation: Obama is a sort of secret-agent philosopher. “He would have had to deny every word,” Kloppenberg tells the Times, which helpfully explains that “intellectual” is “a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.”

When Sarah Palin called Obama a “professor,” some professors accused her of racism. What she really meant, they claimed, was “uppity.” Kloppenberg’s similar characterization, however, draws a quite different response:

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

One assumes that Andrew Hartman is a serious scholar, although one doesn’t know for sure because one has never heard of him. Barack Obama, by contrast, is a scholarly dilettante, a professional politician who has moonlighted as a university instructor.

At Ricochet, Rob Long responds to Kloppenberg’s profile in the Gray Lady and adds:

Let’s focus on the idea that Barack Obama is a “philosopher president.” What a spectacular piece of delusional straw-grasping idiocy! How perfectly it encapsulates the unplugged, unhinged cocoon of the academic left.It’s an analysis that has a delicious appeal, of course, to Barack Obama’s most loyal following. Here’s the punch line:

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

That’s really all you need to know, isn’t it, about our arrogant, out of touch, and hyper-vain president? He reminds that puffed-up, flatulent class of academic hoo-has of themselves! Applause, applause! He’s just like us! We, too, could be presidents. Well, philosopher presidents.

Of course, there was an earlier American president who went almost immediately from academia to the White House, with little more than a cup of coffee at lesser elected office along the way.

In 2008, both as a candidate and as president-elect, the media frequently — and in retrospect with staggering absurdity — compared Obama to some of the most respected presidents in American history: Lincoln, FDR and Kennedy. (And Obama was more than willing to feed into the charade himself.) But there was one wartime president whose name was rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath as Obama, which brings us to John Steele Gordon in Commentary:

I’ve just finished reading Louis Auchincloss’s mini-biography of Woodrow Wilson (part of the “Penguin Lives” series), and I was struck by the similarities between the country’s first liberal president and the man who might be its last (I know, I know, ever the optimist).Wilson was, at heart, an academic, the author of several books, (including Congressional Government, still in print after 125 years). He thought and acted like a professor even after he entered politics. Wilson always took it for granted, for instance, that he was the smartest guy in the room and acted accordingly. Does that sound familiar? Wilson was a remarkably powerful orator. (It was he who revived the custom of delivering the State of the Union message in person, a custom that had been dropped by Thomas Jefferson, a poor and most reluctant public speaker.)

Both men had very short public careers before the White House. Wilson’s only pre-presidential office was two years as Governor of New Jersey. And Wilson thought he had a pipeline to God, which allowed him to divine what was best for the world and gave him a moral obligation to give it to the world whether the world wanted it or not. This last tendency, evident even when he was president of Princeton University, became more pronounced with age as a series of debilitating strokes (the first at age 40) increasingly rigidified his personality.

Both Wilson and Obama were the subjects of remarkable public adulation, and both won the Nobel Peace Prize for their aspirations rather than their accomplishments. In Wilson’s case, at least, it only increased his sense of being God’s instrument on earth. Although the Republicans had won majorities just before Armistice Day in November 1918, in both houses of Congress — and the Senate’s consent by a two-thirds majority would be necessary to ratify any treaty — Wilson shut them out of any say in the treaty he went to Paris to negotiate with the other victorious powers. Obama, of course, shut the Republicans out of any say in both the stimulus bill and ObamaCare.

Jonah Goldberg (who along with Glenn Beck and Reason’s Charles Paul Freund) has done much in recent years to remind Americans of their forgotten decade of the 20th century, much to the New York Times’ chagrin. As he wrote in February of 2008 in the Christian Science Monitor, “You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for — Voters should remember what happened under Woodrow Wilson.”

But they didn’t — and Obama’s core constituency wasn’t about to remind them, perhaps in part because they’ve voluntary deleted most of the details of this era of American history from their own memory banks as well.

23 Comments, 20 Threads

1.
Buck O'Fama

Michelle: Don’t go into corporate America where they, you know, expect you to actually DO stuff. Be like Barky and me and go for no-show do-nothing jobs that pay big bucks and allow you to think you’re “special” because you’re being paid for your high-minded political “value” rather than a grubby economic one.

You see, Barack and Michelle despise working for money. Not the money part, just the working part.

Money is unclean and immoral if you have worked for it and you have actually earned it by producing something of value. The disconnect from reality by the political class, the intellectual class and some (much?) of the corporate class is astounding.

This is the beginning of the beginning of the end of something. We are witnessing an historic period. The present election is just a part of this. I am sure the dinosaurs didn’t have a clue that their days were numbered either – “we’re big and strong – how can we not last forever”? I hope that this extinction is rapid. Evolution of the human race depends upon it. Interesting times are upon us – buckle up.

Odumbo and Mz.-O are just typical affirmative action hires. “How dare you judge me on the merits, when I don’t have any?” Worthless entitlement prostitutes. They never had to accomplish anything, ‘caus they got The Skin. Goes well with tar and feathers. Columbia, Harvard Law, and Princeton conferred their elite credentials on these two dead-head tapeworm parasites. How yo’r proud alumni like them apples?

What’s seemingly different between Wilson and Obama is that the latter has elitist arrogance, but at the same time craves approval of his peer group — other liberal Democrats. In that he has an aggressive agenda, it’s only because he feels that his peer group both has his back, and will do most of the work for him, and that includes going after his opposition. It’s the craving for approval that makes him thin-skinned and angry whenever it doesn’t arrive, and since he’s gotten other people to smooth over the rough spots for him all his political life, he still expects that today, which is why you get lines like the “punish your enemies” tripe he unleashed on Univision. The left’s not going to abandon him, as long as there’s the specter of a Republican president in 2012, but I don’t know what Obama would do if his peer group actually did abandon him for the next new face (or old-faced Hillary) 18 months from now.

Obama loves that “punish your enemies” tripe talk; the “hand to hand combat” talk because, to Barack talk like that has no risk. Obama knows it won’t engender a physical confrontation so he does it because he knows his union thugs are any but afraid of physical confrontation. Protected by the numbers of beer drinking bellied thugs, they can beat up and intimidate most anyone they want to.

What the thugs can’t do is fight with words; it’s not a part of them. It’s like Obama’s girly golf swing, impotent on a golf course, like union thugs can’t get the words up and out in a verbal confrontation.

The following words they have no defense for. Sit back, relax and read some words that beat Obama and his thug allies to a pulp. They reference what could be Obama’s most humiliating defeat of November 2. But, to this girl’s way of thinking, Obama it’s time Obama and his allies get the beating they so sorely deserve. Enjoy.

Harry Reid’s pet name for Chris Coons is “the puppet” or “the pet” or something with an equally,”he’ll march in lock step” connotation. Which of course is a reference to Coons promised desire to vote with Obama, if elected, on every taxpayer-raping bill that comes down the pike.

You’ve heard about Coons trip to Kenya during his junior year in college. He talks about it like it was yesterday. Which it was. But the lessons he learned there about hating the United States he employs today.

Wrote Koons, “In Kenya, I became friends with a very wealthy businessman and his wife and they told me that America was a despicable country; they repeated beliefs they said were held by many in America; that the poor all over the world are lazy and slovenly, uneducated.” They believed America was the fault, that American soldiers were murderers, and Coons began to agree with them as his belief in free enterprise and the boundless opportunities in America dissolved. America was a country to be hated, not heralded.

Anyway, back in America, Coons would dedicate himself to joining forces with Obama type America-haters who wanted to turn America into some kind of European Socialist model; to redistribute America’s wealth while sabotaging America’s free enterprise system any way possible. Which Coons felt required getting into government, the fastest and most effective way to soak the wealthy with taxes and create social programs that would hand out money like there was an endless supply of it. Private enterprise, which created jobs, was the enemy. Creating government make-work jobs was the model because they would add nothing to the GNP; only create workers who depended on the Democratic Party for their livelihood. And so would vote Democratic.

Coons start at his Marxist scheme wasn’t perfect, but he did start doing some of the damage intended. “He became the top executive of New Castle County, home to a majority of Delaware’s population. From a Republican perspective, there’s one really important thing to know about his time in office: In 2004, when Coons first ran for the job, he promised not to raise taxes. Since then, he has raised taxes not once, not twice, but three times.

“Coons inherited a surplus. Celebrating victory on election night in 2004, he said his “top priority would be to continue balancing the budget without increasing property taxes,” according to an account in the local News Journal. As executive of New Castle County, in Delaware, Coons promised voters he’d keep taxes down.”

Of course, a lie from a Marxist mouth isn’t a lie at all because the extremes equal the means.

“Once elected, Chris Coons rose taxes like they was going out of style. In 2006, by 5%; by 17.5 % in 2007 and by a whopping 25% in 2009. He loves taxes. Byron York tells us “he has proposed to raise hotel taxes, paramedic taxes and something heretofore unheard of; a proposal to raise taxes on 911 calls. It was all included in Byron York’s report in The Washington Examiner.”
I hope that York will continue to review Coons’ record. The entire mainstream press is at work on O’Donnell, digging up any kind of dirt on Christine they can find. If they don’t find it, they pay old dates to slander O’Donnell. But the date Coons has is with the voters, November 2, which may signal an abrupt end to his slobbering love affair with taxing citizens to death.

Coons just may have lied to Delaware voters once too often.

Maybe you should consider on November 2 sending Coons back to Kenya for a refresher course. If Coons is elected, the people of Delaware and the rest of us may be Cap and taxed to the point we can’t even afford the trip to the polls.

Hello Folks. A modest proposal for some of our elected-wanna be elected folks. So Nancy, Barack, Sarah, Mitt, Neu, and everyone at CBS, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC ( no wait your all a lost cause) & ABC, Newsweek, NYTombs, Washing Postos-tee!, L.A. fishwrap!

Here is you suggested reading list for January through March; Fox, Limbaugh, Beck your excused. (O’Rielly and Hannity, you need to pull your grades up so re-read at the very least Commager)

Our reading list: Henry Steele Commager, multi volume History of America, David B. Danborn, Carl Neumann Degler -(opposes Howard Zinns views), Robert K. Masse, Robert William Fogel, Uni Chicago, David McCullough, Richard Maybury, Yousef Waleed Meri. There are over a 100 more we could add but this will get the job done.

President Obama was elected on no experience because it was felt that being phenomenally unconnected would be a positive boon in some manner and that, not being a Washington insider, America would get the ride through the car wash that was needed.

Instead, we were just left with the inexperience as that other part didn’t quite work out. On the positive side he’s a polite racist who’s man at the DOJ thinks civil rights is only for black folks. And, he wants to put muslims on the moon so they’ll feel included and won’t mail bombs to people and want to kill authors.

One can only hope that Obama will get so fed up with his Carter-like legacy looming that he will not run for a second term. Doing so might cut into the revenue from the speeches he’ll give for the rest of his life for 100 grand a pop. Can you say this after me? Obama is not a racialist.

19th century American pragmatism if anything was honset and practical and was an enemy of philosophical bullshit– it was American.

Obama is a master of Frankfurt School bullshit — Critical Legal Studies, “Wstern Marxism”, Critical Race Theory, Continetal Philosophy, neo-Colonial Marxism, etc. — the sort of bullshit which inspired Harry Frankfurt to write _On Bullshit_. It’s a European approach through and through and it is just what the doctor ordered for stealth socialists and enemies of those telling the truth about the intellectual fraud of Marxism and socialism.

I’m no fan of George Bush, but you had to be impressed by the pitch he put over the plate last night at the Rangers game. It was a strike with some mustard on it, just like the one he threw in the opening game of the series after 9/11. The comparison between Obama’s high girly arc well off the mark when he threw a first pitch out at a White Sox game does as well as any metaphor for the two.

Roulette Winning System algorithm is based on the exact calculated probabilities of how many numbers appear in 37 consecutive spins. Predicting which numbers to bet on. Calculating such probability is a mind-boggling task. With the aid of my Roulette System, you can do it in a blink of an eye and focus on execution and making money, rather than complicated mathematics and probability. You find all of this very confusing, but the Roulette Winning System (RWS) tells you precisely when to bet, how to bet, where to bet, and why to bet with almost 100% accuracy.

Hello, I’m Berkley. A Professor, Programmer of Probability and Random White Noise theory. I have spent years doing Casino gambling research as a hobby and have developed the Roulette Winning System (RWS) that has nothing to do with luck to win anymore. A mathematical roulette strategy to make money off these online Casinos. I have modelled my secret of beating the online Casino Roulette into a Roulette System (RWS). The Roulette Winning System Software is a easy to use Casino result prediction software (A mathematical core solvable by a computer processor only). An astounding way to earn & make money off the Casino. Any Casino, any time, anywhere in the world, where Roulette is played.

This is a mathematically proven & Casino tested system. A system that can earn you a living. The Roulette Winning System is very advanced, it could not have been developed without the help of a multi processor computer. Its core is probability distribution function program, “Safe way” to win hundreds of the online roulette Casino. Throughout the development of the roulette system, the strategy was thoroughly tested on over 10 million simulated roulette wheel spins. After calculating and analyzing each decision and roulette wheel output, the computer found some startling results. The player now has an unfair advantage when using our Roulette Winning System!

PMI, USA certified professional with over 22 years of exhaustive experience in Project management, Shipbuilding, Operations, Design & integration, financial and team management in India and abroad. Expertise in managing cross-functional activities and proficiency in coordinating with related agencies. Effective communicator with relationship management & negotiation skills.http://www.kinshuk.com
He is MTech (Communication Engg) from IIT(Delhi), BTech (Electrical Engg), PMP (USA), MBA (Jamnalal Bajaj Mumbai) and has diverse experiance in Shipbuilding, Heavy Engineering, IT and Software Engineering worldwide. Areas of expertise include sound organizational abilities, management with the ability to lead large teams to optimize operations by synergizing the use of resources.

Mr. Driscoll, you have writtrn an exposition worthy of any of the “great minds” of our century. As and old Circuit Judge,My writing appears techninal and despite my best effort my works come accross as dry technical and writtrn in such a way that the parties to a legal parties will comprehend them. I have my monents when I doubt the efficiency of a law and question the sanity of those august Senators writing them. But this is nothing compared to what you and your ilk do. Keep up the good work!!! GOD bLESS

2. John Campbell is 100% correct. Buckle up is right.
Another great depression? Another terrorist attack? Why do I have this funny feeling if things turn “real” bad, “real” quickly, that us “ordinary” Americans that cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” as Barry Hussein remarked in Pennsylvania a few years ago, will be the ones taking care of the masses wondering out of the cities looking for help because the government didn’t bring them their toilet paper or baby formula on time. The National Guard was too busy taking everyone’s guns away (like in New Orleans during Katrina) and putting out the fires in the cities.